Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism —— The Politics and Aesthetics of Fear in the Age of the Reign of Terror

----- 哥特式小说和恐怖主义的发明：腥风血雨时代政治和美学的恐惧

ISBN: 9781474227780 出版年：2013 页码：233 Joseph Crawford Bloomsbury Publishing

Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2014This book examines the connections between the growth of'terror fiction' - the genre now known as 'Gothic' - in the late eighteenthcentury, and the simultaneous appearance of the conceptual origins of'terrorism' as a category of political action. In the 1790s, Crawford argues, fourinter-connected bodies of writing arose in Britain: the historical mythology ofthe French Revolution, the political rhetoric of 'terrorism', the genre ofpolitical conspiracy theory, and the literary genre of Gothic fiction, known atthe time as 'terrorist novel writing'. All four bodies of writing drew heavilyupon one another, in order to articulate their shared sense of the radical andmonstrous otherness of the extremes of human evil, a sense which was quite newto the eighteenth century, but has remained central to the ways in which wehave thought and written about evil and violence ever since.